Great bug detection and fixing solution!

My overall experience with the Stackify Retrace is quite satisfying. I can easily afford the software for the great features it is offering. I can develop applications more efficiently and effectively. It is easy to use. I will recommend it to all the programmers or app developers out there.

Pros

Stackify Retrace is an excellent application monitoring and bug fixing solution. I love the bug management system of the Retrace. It is also highly effective and efficient in fixing them. It can easily monitor in real-time how the app is working and the exact intervals at which the features of the app didn't work correctly or when the app crashed. It keeps all the logs of the app so that, it will be easier to detect and fix the failures. I found it very useful while developing .net applications. The dashboard is one of the main highlights. You can quickly get all the details like error logs, crash report, etc. in only one place.

Cons

Customer response staff is very supportive and helps you to figure out your issues. But, on an incident, I got a very late response from them. I think it MUST be improved. Moreover, I find the log filtering a little tricky. Many a times, the log parameters which I don't want to see in the report were also there. It makes the analyzing process slow.

Easy to get started, outstanding customer support

I am using Stackify to monitor a multi-tier application in AWS, and was amazed at how easy it was to immediately get all of the servers reporting data on the app with no extra configuration. Our development team has been equally pleased with how simple it has been to have the application's logs fed right to Stackify and accessible from a single dashboard for our product support team. On top of that, the communication from the company has been outstanding. Even though our app is small, they have given us all the attention in the world. The team at Stackify has even provided multiple conference calls demoing their solution to different players in our company throughout the development cycle. And not a single bit of communication we received from Stackify during our evaluation was sales-focused - they really wanted to make sure that we knew exactly what we would be getting. After initially evaluating a competitor whose products seemed overly confusing and whose costs would have exceeded our total AWS bill, Stackify was an easy choice.

Pros

Very easy to use - doesn't get in the way of development with a steep learning curve. Awesome, accessible support team always at the ready, which was especially nice when we started using more of the advanced features of AWS. For example, when we were talking about writing scripts to help automate parts of our environment, they sent over some scripts to take care of automatically installing Stackify within the hour, saving me a lot of time and research. As a newbie to AWS and the cloud, this saved hours of work.

Cons

Honestly, we haven't experienced a single drawback is using Stackify as an APM provider.

Some really good, some really bad.

Initial impressions were great, we installed it on our staging and then production web servers. It provided an interesting look into the actual site performance without all the server noise. After some time both environments had sites that exhibited issues with the stackify agent. High page load times, timeouts, and general app instability was seen on some, but not all web apps on the server. These issues seemingly appeared out of no-where so perhaps it was an auto-update but we couldn't spend the time troubleshooting. The only quick solution was remove the stackify software from those servers. The uninstall did not clean up after itself and left header information from stackify on all sites and all files seemed to remain in the installation directory. Tech support supplied incorrect remediation information for the header information issue and it caused the server downtime while the VM snapshot was reverted. Googling turned up the correct way of removing their changes. Overall I'd say the beneficial insights gained into the app performance provided by the service were negated by the downtime and headaches created by the agent. Also we lost quite a bit of trust by the dev team in our efforts to provide them a stable platform for their applications. When ever there is an issue now the first question is, "Is Stackify still on that server?"

An amazing product for A to Z bug tracking and fixing

Our product management and testing has become more easy with the use of Retrace, kudos team !

Pros

We really loved their centralized logging feature, Stackify helps us more to find bugs on the system and to take proper measures in time. The main interesting feature we noted is that we can run tests and Stackify will revert back with the accurate results, also a proper monitoring on the stack can be done using Retrace. The major advantage is that one can do all the needful activities like code profiling, monitoring and logging on the single system. We dont need to depend on any other third parties for the same.

Cons

The code deployment system has lot of issues as it takes time to integrate onto to their system and the deployment takes lot of time. Rectify this issue and you will have a great tool and platform.

Finding failures is easy with Stackify

Stackify gives peace of mind when it becomes extremely hard to find bugs. Just go for logs and you get to exact point where the application stalled. It gives alot information about the application. It is one of many tools that .net developer must have.

Pros

It gives in depth knowledge of what all is happening with our application. .net developer finds it very supportive in daily tasks. After one time setup it quiet easy to use. We debug with the help of log monitoring techniques given by Stackify.

Cons

Filtering logs is not as easy with Stackify. We end up searching through many logs unwantedly sometimes. But it gives Stackify power to find everything which is also good sometimes.

DevOps out of the box!

Until Stackify, there was no one tool to do monitoring, performance dashboards, log aggregation, and more. This same technology would come with 5 or more software/hardware products and 5 or more bills as well. Stackify does all of this in one package and provides you the actionable insights necessary to target problems when they happen and point you directly to where they are happening and all systems/software affected.

Pros

Log aggregation is by far my favorite feature. Beyond this, the dashboards provide the window directly to your systems, stacks and help interrelate software and hardware systems, even across multiple data centers and cloud sites.

Cons

Putting on my software engineer hat, I would like to have the ability to prescribe templates for how I want to view certain aggregations of logs for certain app stacks to better represent that stack right out of the box instead of having to select it each time.

Cheapest APM which can compete with market leaders

Overall all very much satisfied for choosing this tool

Pros

Cost. Its very cheap and has 85% functionalities provided by the market leaders.

Cons

Setting up initially can be little tough.

makes DEV Ops so much easier

In most of my career I've been a consultant at major corporations, mostly concerned with 'getting it done'. Most of these companies have entire departments focused on operations and don't need me doing that job, but some of my smaller clients have asked that I take these roles on as well and until I found Stackify I felt like there was too much. I still feel that way but at least now I can see trouble spots and drill in. Instead of having to spend all my time finding the hotspot I can now spend that time fixing the hotspot.

Pros

I love the graphs, and the details and the ease of navigation, plus when I was stuck on a particular issue, the Stackify support was very helpful.

Cons

The documentation is there for sure, but more is always better.

Easy solution to get centralized logs in a hurry.

Scouring the web for centralized logging solutions to use for a Java-based solution I am currently working at. I came across Stackify. Initially it was somewhat down my list of candidates - with much more flashy. But after trying a bunch we ended up with Stackify due to how easy it was to get useful logs into the system. And how well it works with Java out of the box.

Pros

* Easy to set up for Java * Intelligently collects and groups Java exceptions allows

Cons

- Does not really provide any tools advanced analyses of logs - Requires some additional code to proper shut down - The logging appender itself throws connection exceptions fairly often that ends up in the general overview of how the application is doing

The server tracker

Overall a very good package for developers like me to track my whole code status at one go.

Pros

It loads automatically all my codes independent of their environments and provides a very qualitative support for the bug detection and helps in debugging. I can keep track of all the things happening on my server.

Cons

Bundles up all the report and sometimes multiple deployments causes errors.

Stackify has saved us so much time and resources

Not only was the set-up great by the Stackify support staff, but the data that we were able to extrapolate from the information provided helped reduce pages error and slow loading on over 30% of our internal .net ERP. We are extremely thrilled to have this software working, and with the great historics that it provides, if the server ever has a fault, I don't have to worry about tracking down what caused the crash before getting the server back up again. With Stackify I can just go through the logs of the user sessions at anytime, so I can look through what happened later, instead of making sure that I nailed down the issue before rebooting the server and losing info about what 'currently was causing the hangup'. Thanks for the great software guys.

Pros

The ability to drill down into an issue is phenomenal, you can spend your time wisely with this feature. Focus on your biggest problems first right? So, start on the dashboard and just start diving in on the top issues from there. You get to see what went wrong, and all of the calls and requests to the server by simply drilling down, it makes sure that my small dev team is spending their time on the issues that will have the biggest day to day impact for our users.

Cons

Slight learning curve, but with any robust software that is always the case. Thankfully, the support staff is willing to go through extensive deep-dives into explaining how the software works.

Immediately knew we needed it

We had been searching for a good APM solution for a better price than the goldmines others were charging for too few features. We found Stackify and immediately knew that it was the right fit for us. It was very EASY to get useful data right away with a minimum of knowledge of the Stackify product.

Pros

Data is easily visually consumable. Traces make it easy to tell what calls are problematic.

Cons

Averaging data over a time period. For example, I want to know what the Average CPU or RAM usage is for a certain time period and not just see a graph and guess the average. Also, better delineation between server and webapp monitors (why do each share some fields?). Finally, need the ability to apply more than one monitor to a server or webapp.

Stackify Retrace has been monumental in our day-to-day monitoring of our 70+ Azure VMs.

Streamline's my workflow; I don't have to visit each machine individually as they're all in my Stackify portal.

Pros

Dashboard, reporting at a glance, custom parameters/alerts, super-scalable,. Also, they have 3 levels you can set, which is really nice to not have a 4-alarm fire for 80% mem usage.

Cons

Setting up parameters to monitor can be challenging to figure out, but just because there are so many. You really need to know what you want to monitor.

It is awesome and helps us to trace the logs quickly than any other tool

Easy of use for any developer to debug and trace the issue

Pros

Retrace give detailed logs. I used new relic before, and i feel Stackify much worth than new relic. Stackify's customer support is much responsive. Also, it was easy to set up on azure and get it running.

Cons

The search feature can be improved a bit, when i plug in some parameters, it is not returning results as expected

Best in Market - In Budget - Gives In-depth insight of your application

Performance and Error monitoring of application on different servers. We include both web applications and APIs as well.

Pros

There are a lot of features that one can like about STACKIFY. To begin with, we have alerts that can be setup when you cross the threshold value for a particular variable that you are concerned about. You have a fancy dashboard which gives you a good idea of what is happening around with your application. The other good thing is the segregation of alerts into three parts - warning alert, critical alert and outage alert. We have a variety of filters given in the tool making it easier for the user to get to the issue without wasting much time - Filter by error, Filter by logs, filter by APM. Implementation of this tool is as easy and simple as it can be.

Cons

Dashboard is something that can still be improved and make more detail oriented. Slow SQL Queries can be more drilled down to get to the root level as to which query is taking more time.

Excellent tool to track your application logs

It is an excellent tool to track your application logs on all the environments. It enabled to capture crash logs, error logs and capture statistics and more.

Pros

Stackify Dashboard which allows me to monitior my required app at a time on single clic.k, and the error logs with app name and environment name

Cons

Filters in logs search, it is bit confusing. It could have improved and enriched to be more user friendly